


the heavy machinery of the heart

by rusesdeguerre



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Domesticity, Established Relationship, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:01:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25251286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rusesdeguerre/pseuds/rusesdeguerre
Summary: After Andy fucks off to God-knows-where and Booker rents a sketchy, lowly-lit motel room twenty miles outside of Kathmandu, presumably to get drunk and be depressed in peace, Nicky turns to Joe and asks, “Well, where to next?”
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 115
Kudos: 1368





	the heavy machinery of the heart

In Venice, after Joe gets shot twice in the head and Booker has to spend twenty-four hours threatening local authorities with bodily harm if they didn’t erase the tape footage from the security cameras, Andy buys all of them a cup of coffee—tongue-scaldingly hot and wonderfully bitter—and says, “I can’t do this anymore.”

“One year,” Booker negotiates. “One year and then we’ll regroup.”

Andy gulps down her coffee with a look on her face that screams exhaustion and says shortly, “Fine. Don’t contact me unless there’s an emergency.”

After Andy fucks off to God-knows-where and Booker rents a sketchy, lowly-lit motel room twenty miles outside of Kathmandu, presumably to get drunk and be depressed in peace, Nicky turns to Joe and asks, “Well, where to next?”

Some insane part of Joe wants to say, _home_ , like that is still somewhere he can return to, a place that hasn’t been burnt down or abandoned or—more certainly—forgotten in the cracks of memory. Besides, home is Nicky now, has been Nicky for a millennium: Nicky and the roughness of his palms, the pockmarks along the edge of his jaw from a childhood bout of some unidentified illness, the slopes of his shoulders and the crooked slant of his nose, the sweep of his eyelashes, the mole on the shell of his left ear. Did Joe love anyone as much as he loved Nicolo di Genova? He didn’t think so.

“Wherever,” he says, so Nicky books two one-way train tickets to Paris with a smile, small and private, followed by a salacious leer that promises certain indecency and makes a laugh involuntarily spill out of Joe’s mouth. Nicky kisses him, slow and gentle, the kind of meltingly intimate kiss that makes Joe think of miracles and Malta in 1865 and the sleepy look on Nicky’s face when he wakes up in the morning, so startlingly alive, and all the other gorgeous things in life.

The train tickets were cheap and the muggy, rail-clattering 20-hour train ride from Venice to Paris is a good indication of just how cheap.

“You couldn’t have shelled out for a plane ticket?” Joe grumbles after the fifth time the train hits another bump on the tracks and Joe hits his head against the overhead metal rack. “We’ve got money, you know that, right?”

“The train is more romantic,” Nicky argues, “which I thought you would appreciate since you’re a terrible romantic.”

“Just this once, I would have been alright sacrificing the romance,” Joe says, but he tucks his head into the warm, familiar nook of Nicky’s neck to hide a smile.

The train arrives at Gare Saint-Lazare in the middle of the night, and Joe remembers the last time they were here, on the way to Normandy because Joe had seen a photograph of the Dives clogged with abandoned armour and German artillery and bloated-up corpses and realized that he didn’t even remember what that river looked like without the ravages of war. “Christ,” he had said to Nicky with a stab of remorse that didn’t belong in this decade or century or millennium, “that isn’t how that river should look.” So they hitched a ride in the back of a pleasant-faced drug-dealer’s truck and spent three days in Normandy, sitting on the banks of the now clear, corpse-less river, and on the last day, it had rained torrentially and the river had flooded, drowning swaths of the spring grass and fields of wild sage and cow parsley.

The train pulls to a screeching stop, and they stumble off the train and stagger onto a nearby bench. “You need a shower,” Nicky says. “You smell like shit.”

“You don’t smell any better.”

“True,” Nicky agrees, “but I’m much handsomer than you, so it doesn’t matter as much.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Joe retorts, his mouth closing around a smile. He wrestles a pack of cigarettes out from the back pocket of his jeans, an almost empty, waterlogged and dried with the staticky hotel hairdryer box of cheap Camel Extra Lights that he nicked from Booker’s duffel bag before he left for the airport. He flicks open the box and offers one of the two cigarettes left to Nicky, who declines but produces a lighter from the pocket of his stained, well-worn leather jacket.

“You know,” Nicky muses wryly, “those things are going to kill you.”

“I’d like to see them try,” Joe says, laughing around his cigarette. He leans down to stick the cigarette tip to Nicky’s lighter, cupping his hand around the flame, and pulls in a small bit of smoke into his mouth. “Let’s go back to Normandy,” he says.

“Again? For your river?”

Joe shrugs. “Why not? It’s just another two hours.”

“Your sentimentality is going to kill you before those cigarettes,” Nicky tells him, but he sneaks a drag out of Joe’s cigarette and goes to the ticket booth to purchase another two criminally cheap train tickets for Normandy.

__________

Gare de Bayeux is nearly empty when they arrive right before dawn. A mother and a daughter sit on a bench fingering their train tickets and wrapped in heavy winter jackets even though it’s midway through the spring and the impending rain wraps the city in 85% relative humidity.

Nicky leads Joe to an abandoned cottage—rotted wood and rain-damaged thatched roof—in the Normandy countryside, in the middle of an overgrown apple orchard that hasn’t been cultivated since—forever, maybe. It’s one of Nicky’s many collected houses, scattered around the world; this one is nothing more than a glorified storage container, really: stacks of books in various languages from various countries in various states of care, crossbows and arrows and swords, an axe with dried blood still on it, vases of blackened flowers, termite-infested logs of firewood from who-knows-what century.

Joe coughs when he kicks open the door, knocking up hundreds of years worth of dust. “We should ask Andy if we can share her cave.”

“Oh, c’mon,” Nicky says, standing in the centre of the tiny cabin, hands on his hips. “It’s not so bad. We just need to dust.”

“And get some furniture.”

“And replace that wall.”

“For fuck’s sake,” Joe swears.

Nicky laughs. “Normandy was your idea, remember?”

Joe gingerly steps over a stack of leather-bound books and peers at the wood stove tucked into the corner of the cabin. “When was even the last time you came in here?”

“Who knows?” Nicky says, walking up beside Joe. “It’s been a century, at least.” He kisses the corner of Joe’s mouth and says again, “It’s not so bad.”

“If you weren’t the love of every single one of my lives, I would get back on the train to Paris,” Joe tells him seriously.

Nicky rolls his eyes so hard that Joe thinks they might fall out of his head. “Yeah, _right_ ,” he says and kisses Joe full on the mouth. “Tell me again about how I’m the love of your life.”

“Of every single one of my lives,” Joe corrects between kisses.

“You’re so insufferable,” Nicky mumbles, inexplicably flushing red even after who-knows-how-many years of Joe’s love proclamations, and ducks his head to press little, teasing kisses in the space behind Joe’s ear, the curved bow of his mouth, the divot under his collarbone.

Joe laughs quietly and chases Nicky’s mouth, wet and desperate, pulling Nicky even closer to him, until his belly is pressed against Joe’s hipbone and his hands slide under Nicky’s grimy t-shirt to trail up the knobs of his spine, hot and ravenous. It astounds Joe sometimes that it still feels like this, that even after a millennium, it still feels like the first time and, maybe even more astoundingly, that he can still remember the first time—

Waking up on a beach by the sea, the water around him dark red from his blood or maybe Nicky’s blood, Nicky lying face-down in the sand with Joe’s axe sticking out from the back of his head. It had been nighttime, the moon half-shrouded by a caravan of clouds in the starless gun-metal sky; they were so removed from the rest of the battle that Joe—they had still been Nicolo and Yusuf back then, unknowns to each other—could hear his own heart clattering aimlessly in his chest. The world had felt so empty, all of a sudden, and when Nicky woke up, they sat beside each other in silence, watching the waves lap at the shore. At dawn, when the gods, his God and Nicky’s God and everyone else’s God, were just waking up and the moon desperately lingered at the horizon, barely there, and the skies were turning into blue that shimmered with an iridescent paleness, Joe had reached over and clasped his hand over Nicky’s.

“What are we doing?” he had asked, exhausted after two weeks of fighting.

“Dying,” came the answer.

“No, we aren’t.”

“Trying to die,” Nicky amended and squeezed Joe’s hand.

The last time Nicky killed him, a spear through his stomach, he had cradled Joe against his chest and watched him die. Even now, Joe remembers Nicky’s warm breath on his face, the solidity of Nicky’s body against his—so _real_ , when nothing seemed real to Joe anymore—the biting wind, the salt from the sea and the grit from the sand, waking up and Nicky leaning down and kissing him and then whispering through a mouthful of fear and quiet terror, “Leave with me,” Joe thinking that he’d follow Nicky to the end of the world if he just asked.

Back in the twenty-first century, Nicky bites gently down on Joe’s bottom lip and asks, “What are you thinking about?”

“You,” Joe answers honestly.

“Less thinking, more kissing,” Nicky suggests and bites down harder.

Joe gasps quietly and clutches Nicky’s arms. “Please tell me there’s a bed in here.”

“No bed,” Nicky says. “Let’s go outside.”

“Are you serious,” Joe groans, but he lets Nicky pull him outside and lay him out on the grass, still wet from the morning dew. Nicky leans down onto his elbows, hovering above Joe, and rolls their hips together and licks into his mouth with a desperate noise that sounds wounded and surrendered and wretched all in one, like he was also remembering that first time when they were still Yusuf and Nicolo, before there was Andromache and Lykon and Quynh, before either of them understood what was happening, only that it was them against the world now. Joe trails a hand up Nicky’s thigh and yanks him down so they’re flush chest-to-chest, not an inch of space between them. He can recognize Nicky by the calluses on his hand or the way his mouth feels against his or the jut of his knuckles or the way his heart beats in sync with his own—he knows that body better than he knows his own. Between the too many years and the too many wars and the too many ways to die and come back to life again, Nicky and Joe have always been Nickyandjoe, one syllable, in life and in death.

“Tell me again that you love me,” Nicky breathes, and Joe obliges.

__________

They sleep outside that night, wrapped around each other and in moth-eaten blankets and fabric curtains found stuffed behind a bookshelf. In the morning, they head into town, passing by rolling hills with cattle grazing on pasture and white blossoms blooming on the neatly planted rows of apple trees. Joe pulls out the last cigarette from his pack, motions for Nicky’s lighter, and then slips his hand into Nicky’s. The sun sidles up to the horizon, broad streaks of pink and red, and Nicky keeps in step beside Joe, limned against the sunrise and the flaring orange of the sun. They buy some bread and cured meats and a cheap collection of sloppily painted ceramic planters.

“You’re paying,” Nicky says at the counter. 

“It’s all the same money,” Joe tells him.

Nicky scrunches his face up. “I can’t afford this, I’ve got student loans to pay.”

“Fuck off,” Joe snorts. 

“I could have student loans,” Nicky argues.

“What would you even learn in college?”

“Metal welding,” comes the answer.

Joe rolls his eyes. “You already know how to weld metal.” He passes a couple of bills to the grocer and takes the bag of food.

On the way back, they pass by an old paint-chipped barn with a pile of furniture piled up behind it, including a mattress in decent condition, wrapped in plastic. They knock on the door of the farmhouse sitting at the edge of property, but nobody answers so Joe leaves the rest of their money tucked into their mailbox and they haul the mattress back to their little cottage. They spend the rest of the day cleaning the cabin and getting the wood stove to work again and collecting dry firewood. Joe washes down the mattress and then burns the collection of sundry dead things in the house.

As the sun sets, Nicky sits down beside Joe, leaning up against an apple tree, and hands him a sandwich on a chipped porcelain plate. “It’s not so bad,” Nicky murmurs.

“The sandwich?” Joe asks around a mouthful of bread. “It could be worse.”

Nicky gives him an exasperated look. “No, stupid—the house. This life.”

Joe wraps a free arm around Nicky’s shoulders and pushes his head to lean against his own. “It’s not so bad at all,” he agrees.

Those first weeks on the run, after Nicky asked Joe to leave with him and Joe said yes without hesitation but before Andromache found them, they cycled through dozens of different villages, finding someone to fight—a different village every day, a different fight every day, a different death every day.

“Is this all you want?” Joe had asked one night, lying atop a bale of hay and staring up at the stars. “All this fighting?”

“This is all we have,” Nicky had answered, no doubt thinking about all those burned-down mosques and churches and cathedrals.

Those nights, all he wanted was for a man as devastating as the rise of the mountains to place a large, meaty hand on his ribs and push and push until something cracked, to peel the layers of his body back one by one—skin, muscle, sinew, tendon, flesh—until the cavity of his body opened underneath that hand, viscera and blood and organs. He wanted someone to remove his ribs and burn them in an acid-bright blue fire, burn away every wicked part of him, every part of him that had tasted blood and _liked it somehow_ , every part of him that wouldn’t let him fucking die: rebirth, phoenix rising from the flames, baptism, proof that he was still alive.

If he didn’t have Nicky, he’s not sure if he’d bleed anymore when someone cuts him open: more machine than man.

“You know, I used to dream of killing you,” Joe tells the love of his life.

“You didn’t just dream of it,” Nicky remarks, poking at a spot on his chest where Joe once drove a sword through once.

Joe grins and ducks down to kiss that spot on his chest. “Are you really going to hold that against me forever? I stopped, didn’t I?”

“And not a moment too soon,” Nicky says dryly, and then: “I don’t know if I would’ve made it without you.”

“Maybe there is a god after all—” Joe huffs out a breath in amusement— “making sure that we found each other and keep finding each other.”

“Maybe we’re both just stubborn fuckers.”

Nicky turns his head to catch Joe in a kiss, easy, effortless, like this is something that was always meant to be, and Joe closes his eyes and kisses him back because he wants to and because he can and because it’s as simple as that sometimes. Not always, but sometimes.

“Promise me something,” Nicky whispers.

“Of course,” Joe promises.

Nicky says, “If we ever lose each other, you’ll find me again.”

Joe laughs softly. “Even if it means pissing off Andy?”

“Obviously.”

“I promise you,” Joe swears.

__________

Joe doesn’t believe in the God he grew up praying to, the God he spilled blood and killed men—killed Nicky—over. He has approximately five billion different opinions about that particular character development and Nicky has about five billion more, but he doesn’t make a habit of thinking about them, which is to say that Joe’s belief system nowadays is pretty flimsy.

What _does_ he believe in?

He believes in doing good, he supposes, even if that means picking up a sleek, chrome-lined for resistance, American-designed and produced rifle and gunning down a man. He believes in doing the right thing and doing the good thing. Being kind. He believes in the underdog. He believes in the people, in humanity, in revolt and revolution, in fighting fire with fire if you have to. He believes in second chances and the ability for people to change, he believes in the wind and the stars and the sand. In the passage of time, the wear and tear of houses and people and things: cracks in the ceiling, water damage around the kitchen sink, arthritis and cracking joints, paint chipping away from a dresser, holes in the sleeves of a sweater, oil and grease stains—the sort of thing that time always does to places and people and things well-loved. Himself, most of the time. A select few conspiracy theories. He believes in love—of course.

He believes in Nicky. He’s sure of Nicky. Christ, he’s so sure of Nicky.

__________

The one and only time they stayed anywhere for longer than a month was in 1941 when Booker got them a long-con job in the States. “Five months, at least,” he had said. “Government-backed.”

“It’s _government-backed_?” Joe replied incredulously. “It’s backed by the United States government? During this war? Are you fucking insane?”

But Andy had just calmly said, “Joe, I vetted it personally, it’s fine,” and that was that, so Joe sighed only once and they packed their bags and flew to New York City. It was summer when they first arrived: pink flower buds and white-yellow Linden flowers and a smog that settled above the city. They found an abandoned sugar refinery building and set up camp there, five months of getting lost in the eerie industrial ghost-town surrounding the sugar refinery if you wandered too far away. Joe spent long afternoons drowsily reading case files and archived government-protected documents and watching over Nicky’s shoulder as he sketched the stray fat tabby cat sunbathing on the fire escape of the also abandoned building across the street. They all liked this version of New York: dance halls with soaring ceilings and creaking wooden floors, the summer so stiflingly hot they would sleep on the cool concrete floor and still wake up sweating like pigs, cooking dinner for each other and getting drunk off of the shitty wine Andy would sometimes pay for and sometimes steal depending on what her mood was like that day.

Nicky, to the surprise of every single person alive, became a baseball fan, and spent an embarrassing number of hours listening to the Dodgers games on the radio (Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak that year, which remains unbeatable and will probably remain unbeatable, had Nicky alternating between grudgingly impressed and seething mad). When crosswords started appearing in the Times the next winter, after Pearl Harbour, Joe would wake up at dawn and find Nicky already awake, sitting on one of the many metal overhangs with the crossword spread over his lap and a pen between his teeth. At that point, their covert ops mission was rapidly picking up steam and Andy started spending days locked in the bathroom detailing escape plans in case everything went south, so all of them had a lot more on their minds than what the answer to “9-down: tutelary gods” was, but Joe would find Nicky on that metal balcony every single morning anyway. Nicky and Booker spent their free time trying to restore a dusty Cadillac V-16 they found parked behind the sugar refinery so the entire time they were in New York, Nicky’s hands smelled like motor oil; in Joe’s dreams, he can taste gasoline fire at the back of his throat.

In the end, the mission went tits-up and they had to fish Nicky out of the Hudson River, and Andy was emphatically clear about her stance about long-con government-backed missions after that.

Andy doesn’t believe in settling, so they don’t settle. There are always two priorities during a mission: 1) do the job, and 2) get out without being seen. It makes sense: it’s easier to track a trail when the trail lives in one spot for more than a couple months, but it’s also a lot harder to live any semblance of a life when every single week is a convoluted process of country-hopping in the back of pick-up trucks and cargo trains and Vietnam War-era Huey helicopters.

Neither Joe nor Nicky are used to a life of normalcy and both of them wake up in the middle of the night with the bedsheets soaked through, thinking it’s noon, and there’s a knife or gun on their body or within reaching distance at all times. They don’t have much furniture, and the furniture they do have was either collected by Nicky ages ago from some unknown corner of the world (a round wooden dining table that wobbles so badly they have to stick a fat German-English dictionary under one of its legs, a 17th-century Brazilian rosewood sideboard, a glass oceanic-blue vase perched on the kitchen counter with a single branch of dogwood limply leaning over the lip of the vase) or found behind abandoned farmhouses in the Normandy countryside (that one double mattress from their first day here, a collection of lackadaisically upholstered and mismatched stools, the crooked line of ceramic planters on the windowsill that now house the basil plants sleepily soaking up the sun). Nicky from this century has the same reading habits as the Nicky from the last century and the Nicky from the century before that: voracious, indiscriminate, whatever he can get his hands on, so the piles of books and old texts in the house begin to accumulate in an exponential manner. All of Nicky’s—and some of Joe’s—books sit in haphazard stacks, collecting dust, on the floor.

One night in the middle of June, Nicky wakes just as Joe is drifting off to sleep—it’s three in the morning. Joe hears a wet gasp from beside him and looks over to see Nicky’s eyes flying wide open. There are tear tracks down his face and his mouth falls open like he’s screaming his throat raw, but no sounds comes out.

“Where am I?” Nicky grits out, back teeth audibly grinding together.

Joe rolls over and grabs Nicky’s hand until it’s resting against his steady heartbeat. “France,” he says. “We’re in France.”

“France,” Nicky repeats.

And Joe breathes in once before continuing, “Your name is Nicolo di Genova. You’ve been alive for many, many years. I met you in Jerusalem what feels like a million lifetimes ago. You are the great love of my life.”

A moment of silence passes—almost too long, but then Nicky lets out a huff of shaky laughter, and Joe lets his shoulders drop down from his ears. “That hasn’t happened in a long time,” Nicky says. 

“Not since São Vicente,” Joe agrees. This happens sometimes, to both of them—waking up, gasping for breath, disoriented and panicked from the trauma that is being alive for a thousand years. 

Nicky lets out a steadying, anxious breath. He brings Joe’s hand up to his dry mouth and presses his knuckles to his lips. 

All of this is to say that neither of them are well-adjusted, normal people but—

Every night, Joe comes home to Nicky, the love of this life and every life, and Nicky smiles at him, so terribly genuinely that a piece of heaven blows into the house, and Joe thinks that counts for something. It has to mean something, that in the morning, when the light pours through the window, dense and buttery, and shatters over Nicky’s head as he languidly stretches in bed so that he’s haloed in light, and Nicky kisses him with something hard and furious and wholly enveloped, and they fuck unhurriedly and with that slow-simmering pool of desire and want so that time seems to slide past them aimlessly and randomly, moving forwards and backwards and sideways, and it doesn’t matter what year or century or millennium it is, as long it’s still the two of them. In the afternoon, when it’s hot as hell and the humidity clings to them like a second skin, they go down to the river and swim naked until they can’t stand being in the water anymore, and it’s just the two of them in each other’s arms by the water, Nicky’s knobbly knee digging into Joe’s ribs, he thinks that maybe he understands this world a little bit. 

The world is loud and violent and terrifying and some days, like Andy, Joe can barely stomach it. The world screams constantly, about everything, and it’s enough to drive anyone to insanity, but here’s the rub: there’s a lovely man in bed with him who tells him about love and about spending the rest of forever with him, a man who holds his hand like it’s something fragile. There’s a man cleaving his heart open and tucking the sound of Joe’s laughter into his split-open heart, there’s a man stitching that heart right back up so he can keep that sound somewhere safe where nobody else can reach. There’s a man who Joe has watched civilizations rise and fall and rise again with. There’s a man who he’s dreamt about since 1090 A.D. and hasn’t stopped dreaming of. It makes sense now, as it has always made sense; maybe Joe doesn’t know what he’s doing here, never dying fast enough, but he knows that, at the very least, he’s here for Nicky and Nicky’s here for him and that’s the real honest truth—and, as far as Joe is concerned, that’s plenty enough.

**Author's Note:**

> title is from "this is the nonsense of love" by mindy nettifee. here's a line from that poem that is really just nicky and joe: "the truth is this: my love for you is the only empire i will ever build. when it falls, as all empires do, my career in empire building will be over."
> 
> the answer to 9-down: tutelary gods is lares. it's from the first crossword the nytimes published (on 15 feb 1942). 
> 
> i would personally like to thank this movie for getting me out of a months-long writer's block during which the only thing i wrote was a dry-ass history essay for school. i did very little research and also didn't do much (read: none) editing and just in general did not think critically abt this at all. they're in love and that's all you need to know!!! thanks y'all for reading, and i hope you're all well and safe. [twitter](https://twitter.com/rusesdeguerre) | [tumblr](https://rusesdeguerre.tumblr.com/)


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